There is a man in Atlanta who spent twelve years watching other people launch startups while his immigration visa tied his hands. That man is KP - and the wait made him obsessive about other people's wins.
Karthik Puvvada arrived in the US from India to study electrical engineering at Vanderbilt. He graduated into a country where starting a company on a work visa was, for practical purposes, not an option. So he did the next best thing: he became indispensable to everyone who could. He built communities. He championed launches. He interviewed founders who raised millions. He developed a philosophy - Build In Public - and turned it into a movement before most people had heard the phrase.
When the visa constraints lifted, KP did not launch cautiously. He went straight to On Deck and built the No-Code Fellowship from scratch to $1.25M in annual revenue, shepherding 360+ founders from 40 countries. He then ran an accelerator at Day One Founder School backed by Gary Vee's ecosystem. He launched his own program - Build In Public Fellowship - ran five cohorts, hit an NPS of 83, and wound it down when the unit economics did not add up. That's not failure. That's someone who reads a spreadsheet and respects it.
Now he leads community at Netlify, the deployment platform backed by a16z and Bessemer at a $2B valuation. He is also a venture partner at Utopic Ventures and an angel in companies like Softr and Cal.com. His podcast - Build In Public - sits in the top 10% globally, with guests including Alexis Ohanian, Gary Vaynerchuk, Sahil Lavingia, and Kat Cole.
KP's particular talent is not networking in the transactional sense. It is the ability to make other founders feel seen and supported - at scale, across time zones, and without keeping score. Product Hunt named him Community Member of the Year in 2022 not because he launched the most products but because he showed up for 150+ other people's launches. That ratio says everything.
The Build In Public movement KP helped build is not just about tweeting your revenue numbers. It is the argument that transparency is strategy - that sharing the messy middle of building a company creates trust faster than any polished press release. In a landscape full of founders performing success, KP performed the work.
